Lake Sonoma. Property owners paid for this water but are not eligible for any of it. Every drop of this water is slated for new urban sprawl. Agriculture has been specifically banned from Lake Sonoma water.

Getting rid of Sonoma County's farms

You just can't make a killing with cows and grapes the way you can with housing developments, or even better, giant shopping malls. The best way to make money is to bulldoze anything remotely agricultural and cover the land with asphalt, drywall and cement and sell the whole mess to unsuspecting rubes from somewhere else.

Of course, first, you have to get those farmers to sell their cheap, undeveloped property. How to do that? You create a General Plan that will kill farming. The farmers will sell. It's just a matter of time.

Here's the recipe: Take away land, a little bit at a time, and deny Lake Sonoma water to agriculture—water that has been paid for by property owners.

H.R. Downs explains

The Sonoma County General Plan Update for 2020 has a very strange idea regarding streams and rivers. The County wants to force anyone owning land with a river or stream running through it to erect fencing on a 100 foot set back from the bank.

That's right, you have to make a standardized 200-foot corridor all along the entire length on any river or stream on your property. Fencing, if you don't know, is expensive. The land between the two fences cannot be used for farming or for dairy cattle. So far, no one has figured out who may mow this area for fire breaks.

The odd thing about this Riparian Corridor plan is that people mistakenly believe it's an idea hatched by environmentalist. It isn't.

The Riparian Corridor idea is a concession by developers given to placate environmentalists. It makes the County and developers look as if they care about rivers and streams. The Riparian setbacks have no affect on developers anyway. The setbacks don't apply to urban sprawl because urban sprawl, by definition, takes place inside incorporated areas (municipalities) and county rules don't apply inside cities.

Your land is our land

What the setbacks really do is cut up farms and dairies and remove productive land wholesale. Some estimates of exactly how much land will be confiscated by the County under the Riparian Corridor scheme hover around the 90,000 acre mark. In other words, Sonoma County officials are planning to seize about 90,000 acres of farmland and farmers will get nothing in return.

The setbacks are supposed to protect riparian banks, meaning banks of streams and rivers. But rivers and streams are notoriously varied in the way they carve themselves through land. Some sections of a stream may have steep rigid banks, but then only 20 feet downstream may have shallow sandy banks. Like anything in life, one size does not fit all.

So why insist on a standardized 200-foot corridor no matter what the waterway looks like? What's the point of insisting on a one-size-fits all rule? The point is to confiscate land from farmers which will directly lay waste to the farming economy and free the land to be bought by developers.

Wrong Turn

The other way to cut up farmland and thereby free it up for developers to buy is to build roads through farms. The Circulation Element of the General Plan Update is all about building new roads. Many of these new roads will carve up people's property against their will.

Let's say that the County declares the need for a new road that will run through an existing farm and cut off approximately 10 acres. The farmer can't use this land anymore because, for example, he can't plow through asphalt. The whole 10 acres has to be treated as a separate, isolated field. Inevitably, the farmer winds up selling the lot to a developer. This process is so common that developers watch new road construction carefully to spot endangered lands.

The County argues that the new roads are essential to relieve either existing traffic burdens or traffic that is expected in the future. This line of reasoning may sound as if there is a plan to alleviate problems but county planners are clearly not solving problems, they are causing problems. The problems we have today with traffic are a direct result of poor planning committed in the last 20-year General Plan.

Of course, building roads to relieve exessive traffic is like buying a larger wardrobe to cure obesity. It is exactly the wrong thing to do.

No more Water for AG

The final straw to break the back of agriculture in Sonoma County is to shut off all water from Lake Sonoma. County officials have already made this clear. The problem with shutting te tap from Lake Sonoma is that property owners have been paying for Warm Springs Dam (which created the lake) on their property taxes since the project began.

Some people have found this fact difficult to believe.But turn to page six of the "Draft Sonoma County Water Agency Water Policy Statement 2002". At the bottom of the page notice footnote 7, wherein it says:

"The Agency’s enabling act (Statutes of 1949, Chapter 994 as amended) contains no limitations on the uses to which water served by the Agency may be put to use. The Agency, under contract with the federal government, has rights to store water in Lake Sonoma for water supply use. Although the Agency’s enabling act does not limit uses to which the Agency may put water, both the federal contract and the water rights for Lake Sonoma preclude the use of water for irrigation and agricultural use."

The emphasis has been added.